Welcome to episode number 71 of The Growth Booth, where today I want to talk about how AI technology is changing the game and how you can use it to make a lot of money with niche websites. I'm specifically going to walk through the technology that I'm using and the ten steps that I'm using to earn thousands of dollars per day, day after day after day, from simple niche websites that absolutely anyone can build.

Now, I think the time that we're in right now with the technology that's available has catapulted the viability of these niche sites to a place that it's never been before. We've got so much more access to be able to quickly and easily create very good, high-quality, engaging content that niche websites need, which has in the past been a roadblock for a lot of people.

To put this in perspective, when I was getting started building my first niche websites way back in 2005, it would either take me a huge amount of time to write content for these websites myself or cost a lot of money to outsource it. We can bypass both of those things by getting incredibly high-quality content in a matter of minutes right now by leveraging a number of different AI tools at our disposal.

Now, I think this is an important topic because it's very timely with the advancements in AI and just the speed at which you can get results, and the amount of leverage that's at your disposal. I sort of feel like this is a train that's leaving the station and you can jump on and reap the rewards. Otherwise, if you come and look at this, in a year's time, perhaps the industry would have changed and been in a different situation at that point in time.

Before I get to the ten steps, let me quickly explain some of the basics and some of the underlying fundamentals of what I'm talking about here when I refer to niche websites making thousands of dollars per day. When I'm thinking about a niche website, I'm thinking about a very specific topic that a website is built around. Instead of gardening, although that isn't a niche topic, I might be thinking more about aquaponic gardening or hydroponic gardening. Instead of a website all about dogs, I might be thinking more about a website specifically about Cocker Spaniel dogs and problems that we can solve and information that we can give to people who are dog owners of cocker spaniels.

Niche websites provide in-depth information along with products and services to solve people's needs and to answer people's questions that they've got. To give you a few more examples, things like health and wellness, that's quite a wide niche, but you could drill down into that. Same with gardening, same with cooking, fashion, technology, and many, many more. The way that we make money is by first getting traffic, and then once we've got that traffic, either serving up advertisements for things that are related to products that people may want to buy to solve problems that they may have or simply by having ads through the likes of AdSense, Google AdSense, where if someone clicks on an ad that's on your website, then you get paid every time they click on it. So we'll talk a little bit more about monetization later, but I think it's important to know, at the very beginning of this, the ways that we can monetize one of these types of websites.

In terms of the audience, which I think is also an important consideration early on, we're looking at building a website that provides a lot of information and can solve issues that people have in a certain niche. Audiences tend to work best when they have a huge amount of passion for a topic or pain and fear around a certain topic and they're searching for information to help them solve that pain or fear that they may be experiencing. If we're able to do that, and if we're able to serve up good information, the monetization is normally pretty easy and takes care of itself.

So how do we get started then? The first step is to identify a profitable niche. There are lots of different ways that you can do this, but since we're speaking and focusing in on AI technology right now, I think using the likes of Chat GPT, which is a free tool, you can do a Google search for it. It's developed by OpenAI and it's called Chat GPT. You can uncover lots of profitable niches that you may have never even been able to imagine before. I just did this recently. I went into my Chat GPT account and asked it to give me a bunch of niches, and it came back with things like home brewing, craft beer and cider, 3D printing and design for hobbyists, ethical and sustainable travel, indoor rock climbing, cold water swimming and gear associated with that, home espresso machines and coffee culture, natural parenting and baby products, homesteading, virtual reality gaming, tabletop role-playing games and accessories, and there are thousands and thousands of little niches like this that you can use to make money.

Before going any further, it's important to validate that you're actually going to be able to make money from them because it's one thing to be able to get traffic coming in, but if the niche is not something that can be commercialized and monetized, then if the objective is to make money, then that's not very good.

The next step, step number two, is to validate the niche and the way that we do this. And we're not just talking about monetization here, we're also talking about demand and interest. Demand and interest are two things that are really important when you are looking at analyzing a niche. One of the best ways to analyze this is looking at the search volume. Now, the search volume are the number of people that are searching in the search engines for a specific search phrase at a given period of time. If you're using the likes of the Google Keyword Planner or SEM Rush, they'll give you search volume numbers that are based on a monthly period. A keyword like 'cocker spaniel training' might get 5000 people searching for it in the world in a given month. Now, with 'cocker spaniel training' , you'd also have 'cocker spaniel barking', ''cocker spaniel digging problems, 'cocker spaniel anxiety', and a whole bunch of other different keywords. Each one of those keywords can potentially be bringing you traffic.

Looking at the search volume and making sure that a niche is going to be able to provide you with enough search volume is the first step. The other thing that I like to do is to make sure that a niche is not like a flash in the pan, to make sure it's not something that's here today and gone tomorrow. Google Trends is a good free tool that you can use to have a look at this. You can do a Google search for Google Trends and you'll find that you can put a keyword into Google Trends and it will give you a graph showing you the interest in terms of search volume over a period of time. As long as that graph is fairly steady and not declining or not flatlining at zero, then you're normally good to go.

Now, the next thing that I like to look at is the competition. We can think about this as the difficulty in getting rankings or getting exposure for different keywords that are important in the niche. So if one of my target keywords in the cocker spaniel niche is 'cocker spaniel training', how difficult would it be for me to get exposure, get rankings in the search engines for that kind of a keyword? Keyword tools like SEMrush, and I'll make sure we include a link to SEMrush with the show notes, are really useful when it comes to assessing keyword difficulty. There are other tools out there as well such as Ubersuggest, which also give you insights into the potential difficulty of getting ranking for a keyword. But we want to look at this as a whole because there are thousands and thousands of different keywords out there that are related to each and every niche. You can't just look at one keyword like 'cocker spaniel training'. You want to look at dozens of keywords and assess, do you think that this would be a keyword that you could potentially get exposure around?

So again, SEMrush is a good tool there. For keyword difficulty, I think anything with a keyword difficulty of under 50 as SEMrush rates it or scores it is fair game. That's a keyword that you could get ranked for and the lower the better. A keyword difficulty of under 20 in SEMrush is something that I think you could get rankings for in the very short term, and by that I mean a matter of weeks. SEMrush is a great tool.

You can also use AI like Chat GPT to gather intelligence about the commercial viability of a niche by looking at the pricing of products in a niche. If I was getting into the cocker spaniel niche, I might ask Chat GPT, "What are the most important products or most useful products that people who have got cocker spaniels will buy?" and that would give me a list back of different products. Then I can ask even further and say, "What do these products typically cost?" Based on this, I'll be able to start to get a feeling about the cost of products in the niche. And as long as the products are not dirt cheap, as long as they're not selling for $2 or $3, if they're sort of $20, $30 $50 or more, then there's probably plenty of money to be made as long as there is search volume as well.

The next thing you might want to do is to choose a domain name. For this nowadays, I basically just go straight to Chat GPT and I ask it to help me come up with a domain name. I recently actually did this for a niche that I was looking at and what I said to Chat GPT was this and I'll read this out, I said, "Help me come up with a list of domain name ideas for the parenting niche. The name should combine words that represent the niche and have fewer than 18 characters in length, not including the dot-com. The word could be an invented word based on the core niche word which is parenting or a combination of words in the niche. Please give me ideas that would work for the name of a website that is informational in nature."

So that's what I asked Chat GPT to do, and then it came back and eventually gave me dozens and dozens of different domain name ideas, which I could then go and check to see if they are actually available for purchase. It's not telling me they are available for purchase, but it's certainly given me a good list of names that I can then quickly check using the likes of the Domain GoDaddy Bulk search, Domain Registration tool, or others and see if they're available. So some of the names it gave me were parentingpulse.com, parentwisehub, naturenest.com, kiddoguidance, proparentingtips.com, raisinggurus.com, parenthoodinsight.com, and many many more. Some of these were really cool and some of these were names that I never would have come up with on my own. The likes of Parenting Pulse, I thought that was a really good one, proparentingtips.com another really good one.

I always want to be looking for a .com. I've never been a fan of .net or .org or anything else domain names for niche websites because .com is still the most authoritative domain extension that you can get. Step three would be to come up with a domain name and register that, and that's something you can actually do over at Float Hosting. If you're doing it at Float Hosting, you can get hosting set up at the same time.

Step number four would be to build out the website skeleton. Now, one of the most common questions I get here is "Can I use ClickFunnels? Can I use Leadpages? Can I use other technology, whatever it might be, to build out the website?" and the short answer is no. If you're building out one of these websites, I firmly believe that WordPress is the best game in town, the only game in town, and you don't need to look any further because WordPress is designed as a platform for publishing content in a very streamlined and simple way, and it's also free.

Now, you do need a theme, which is if you imagine the design and the layout of your website, in addition to just having WordPress, there are lots of free themes out there. My preference is the Commission Theme which is available from Float Funnels, floatfunnels.com. People who are members of Float Funnels or users of Float Funnels are able to download the Commission theme. That's one that I think is a great option, but there are other themes out there as well like the WP Total theme is another one. I think that goes for about $59 per year per website. The Commission theme is good in that you can use it on multiple websites and you don't need to keep paying for it. You need to access Float Funnels, you download it, and then you can continue to use it.

So anyway, without getting into the weeds of that, what we're trying to do in step four is build out the skeleton of the website, and that includes installing WordPress and installing a theme and maybe setting up some other things like a logo, which you could create using Canva or any image creation tool. I'm really enjoying using the Bing Image Creator at the moment. It's an AI image creation tool, and I think that you could create some really good logos with that. Canva is also a great go-to option.

Now, step number five, after you've built out the skeleton of the website is to find topics for what I call the pillar content. What we're really looking for here are search phrases that people are using that represent the low-hanging fruit in a niche, that represent keywords or search phrases where there's a significant amount of search volume, but not that much competition. I call the very best keywords Jackpot keywords. Jackpot Keywords are the best of the best. They've got a significant search volume and a very low keyword difficulty.

Now, we've developed something called the MoneyWord Matrix, and what this does is it gives me a gauge of keyword difficulty. If you imagine keyword difficulty going on a horizontal scale and this is based on keyword difficulty levels from SEMrush, which is my preferred keyword research tool, and on the vertical Y axis is search volume. If something has got a search volume of 1000 or more, then that's a good amount of search volume and that would put it in Jackpot territory if the keyword difficulty was zero to 29, for example. I'll include the MoneyWord Matrix so you can see what that looks like in the show notes over at thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 71 and we'll make sure that down below the video, we embed the MoneyWord Matrix so you can see how keyword difficulty and search volume combine to serve up Jackpot keywords, Excellent keywords, and so on and so forth.

We're trying to find again the sweet spot, identifying topics that we can create content about that represent a significant amount of traffic without being overly difficult. That's ultimately what we're trying to do. I like to publish ten pieces of content initially and then take the site live. Now, in terms of the amount of content, I'm always looking at doing content that's greater than 800 words for each piece of content and ideally 1500 words or more. So we're looking at creating ten pieces of content, and we can do that in step six, which is where we handle content creation.

Using Chat GPT, using AI technology is a complete no-brainer for this right now. It's just so simple. You need to know how to use it the right way, you need to know the kind of prompt that you can put in to get it to create the kind of content that you need. You need to make sure that whatever content is created is still written for humans. We don't want something that sounds too robotic. We don't want something that sounds like it's just being written by some half-baked AI tool. We want something that sounds like it's been written by a very competent human being for other humans to read. You can achieve that with Chat GPT when you know how you're using it.

Now, there have been rumors out there saying that Google and so forth don't like AI-generated content. The reality is that when you're creating the content in the right way, Google would have no way of knowing at all, ever, if it was created by an AI tool or written by a highly paid journalist. It would be impossible for them to work that out, and you can achieve that when you're using the right kind of prompt. Now, there are other AI tools and websites out there that will gauge the amount of originality that content has. You can use those and we'll include a link to one of my favorites in the show notes, but ultimately you can get what you need from a free Chat GPT account. Content creation will be the next thing, and you can pump out this content very quickly. It doesn't take too long. You can wordsmith it, and then it's a case of just copying and pasting it over into your WordPress platform.

The next step would be to add images. This is step number seven, and you can handle images in a multiple number of ways. You can get images from stock image sites like 123RF.com, istockphoto. Pixabay is another one. There are dozens of these out there, and this is where you would typically pay for an image or use royalty-free images on your website. Another option though is to leverage AI and come up with a completely new, 100% unique image. You can use the likes of the Bing Image Creator for this. You can use DALL-E as another one. You can use Midjourney. And again, with all of the content that we're putting out there, we're always striving to have the very best content in a niche, so you want to make sure that that philosophy extends to the images. I don't want to have some weird AI image if it doesn't make sense. However, some of these AI tools can make very, very realistic images that you can use in your content, so it's worth considering.

You can also do do-it-yourself images as well. I was writing an article the other day and one of the things that I was writing about were Apple AirPods. I just took a photo of my own Apple AirPods sitting in the palm of my hand and I was able to use that photo. So that's another example there.

In terms of video content, I've got this at step number eight, and it's actually optional, but video content can add a lot of stickiness to your website and add a lot more depth to the website. In terms of using AI to create videos, you can actually do that right now. You can use the likes of Chat GPT to provide a script, which can then be turned into spoken language using Speechify, and then you can use Movio to put video over the top of that speech. You've got an AI-generated video from complete scratch.

You can also embed other people's videos that already exist on the likes of YouTube into your website. As long as the focus is on providing value, then I think that's a good thing to do. I never shy away from using other people's videos in my content because at the end of the day, if it makes my content stickier, if it makes my website, my web page, more valuable, then I think the trade-off of having someone else's content in there is actually completely worth it.

So again, set number eight is optional, but I do like to use different types of content within my pages, not just big blocks of text. Images are important, videos can be helpful, and you can get on to doing infographics. Audio versions of blog posts are useful as well. There are lots of different things that you can do there.

Step number nine is monetization. There are two main forms of monetization that represent the simplest and most straightforward ways to get started. The first is Amazon, and as an Amazon affiliate, you can sell absolutely any product on Amazon. In fact, I think it's absolutely any product. There might be a few products or a couple of product categories that you can't get into, but 99% of products on Amazon you can sell as an affiliate. Now you might be thinking, well, the affiliate commissions that Amazon pays are so low, they're less than 5%. However, if someone comes to Amazon through your website and through your special affiliate link, you don't only stand to make a commission for the product that they're purchasing on Amazon from you, the product that they went to Amazon to get via your website, but also anything else that they may add to their cart. If you've got a dog training accessory that you're talking about on your website, and you've got a link in that blog post going to Amazon and someone clicks on that and they buy that dog training accessory, if they then go and buy other bits and pieces that they might be sitting in their shopping cart and not even on the same day, but in the weeks ahead, you will also get commissions for those as well, so it can actually get pretty lucrative pretty quickly. So that's the first go-to form of monetization.

The second is AdSense. Now, AdSense is where you put snippets of code into your website and ads will appear. This is powered by Google, and Google will create ads and they'll put them on your website. You don't have to do anything, you just need to copy in the snippet of code, and then when people come to your website, if they click on one of the Google Ads, then you will get paid AdSense revenue every single time someone clicks. If you're getting a lot of traffic to your website, this is a great way to monetize. Even if you're not getting a lot of traffic, it's still a great way to monetize.

Beyond this, there are niche-specific affiliate programs as well. You could have your own product, and of course, you could add in email marketing, which is something that I would absolutely always recommend doing. You can use Sendpad for this. You can go to Sendpad.com to learn about this. It's a simple way, it's an autoresponder that allows you a quick and easy way to start capturing email leads on your website and then you can monetize those. Typically, for every single lead that you've got coming in, you should expect to make at least a few dollars a month at bare minimum.

So if you think about building up a list of 1000 subscribers, if you were able to make $1 per week from each of those 1000 subscribers, that'd be $52,000 in the space of a year. We're just talking about $1 per week from each one of those subscribers. If you are capturing subscribers and building that subscriber list in a way that means you're getting very targeted, interested people, then that is totally doable. Not only is it doable, but I think it's a starting point. At least it would be for me, for what I would be aiming for. I think with 1000 raving fans like this 1000 true fans, you can actually expect to be earning probably $100,000 per year in email marketing profit. So email marketing, very, very lucrative and something that you'd want to add into the mix when you've got content up and running.

Now step number ten is traffic. All of the work that you've done so far is kind of pointless if no one ever comes and visits your website. There are multiple different ways that you can get traffic, but luckily there are not too many ways. It's the common suspects, the likes of search engine optimization. This is where you get free traffic from the search engines. It's actually quite systematic in being able to get this kind of traffic nowadays. It comes from having first and foremost a foundation of high-quality content and then doing some link building, so getting some exposure out there, getting links on relevant websites. This is something you can do yourself using manual outreach strategies or you could use paid services to achieve this as well.

There are different approaches here and this would be a good topic for another day diving into what we're doing with search engine optimization and what's working right now, but that's just one of the sources of traffic. Keep in mind that when we're talking about search engine optimization traffic, we're talking about potentially being able to tap into thousands and thousands of different keywords, each of which could bring you one, two, a dozen, 20 more even visitors per day. So when you stack these on top of one another, the traffic flow can grow pretty quickly. You've then got social traffic and leveraging the likes of Facebook and Instagram. Also, Pinterest is great for traffic that comes through images, YouTube, and on top of all of this, paid traffic as well. You've got lots of different options there. Once you're at this stage, it's really a case of rinsing and repeating, it's adding more content, it's making sure you continue to double down on the traffic strategies. And as long as you do this in a systematic fashion and persevere with it, you can make money with it.

How much money can you make from it? Well, I know from personal experience that you can make thousands of dollars per day from this simple type of website which adds value to the people that come and consume the content. You might also be wondering how hands-off can this really be? Does it take up a lot of time? And the answer is, it can be 100% hands-off. It's affiliate marketing at its core, meaning that you don't have to worry about delivering products to anyone, and you don't have to worry about customer support for anyone as long as you're able to keep attracting traffic from different sources and are able to provide value and have different products that you're monetizing your website with. You don't even have to have products, quite frankly. You could just monetize it with the likes of Google AdSense, but typically recommending different products that solve people's needs is adding value. It's just a no-brainer to do that, then this can be 100% hands-off for real.

Now, my experience in almost 20 years of building niche websites is that they absolutely rock and they just got better because the content creation part just got that much easier. What works is generating the very best content, rinsing and repeating that systematizing. It puts a system in place whereby you can step away and you don't even have to be involved in the content creation and then lets the machine build upon itself. It's one of those things where you can start to get compounding returns over time because your website can get bigger and bigger and bigger, more and more trusted, more people coming in from more places, and it can result in an amazing passive income stream.

That's what I've got for you today. This is episode number 71 of The Growth Booth. Remember to head over to The Growthbooth.com and you can find out about some of the different resources that I've mentioned here. You can get a transcript, show notes, and all that good stuff, okay? Make sure you tune back in next week for the next episode of The Growth Booth. I'll see you then.